Metro Exodus Ray Tracing Tested – A New ‘Can It Run Crysis’

Performance – RTX Off

High

Firstly, we noticed this game reports a stupidly low minimum FPS. This seems to be one particular transition that glitches a little, but the results are consistent in this respect. However, it’s not reflective over the overall minimum, as it seems to be a one time issue. Hopefully, this will be patched. All of the cards performed pretty darn well at High, but it’s a clear indication that it’s going to be a bloodbath when we go to the games Ultra and ridiculously demanding Extreme profiles.

The four cards all performed great at 1080p, no issues there. At 1440p, the RTX 2070 and the 1080 Ti both scored around 60 FPS, with the 2080 Ti clocking almost 90 FPS. However, at 4K, the game took no prisoners. Even the 2080 Ti only hit 52.23 FPS, with the RTX 2070 and 1080 Ti both scoring under 40 FPS.

1080p

1440p

2160p

Ultra

Moving up to Ultra, it’s clear just how much of a severe benchmark this game can be. All four cards scored OK at 1080p, with the RTX 2070 scoring the lowest; 60.39 FPS. However, the 2080 Ti hit a more respectable 93 FPS. Moving up to 1440p, only the 2080 and the 2080 Ti scored above 60 FPS. However, the 49.24 FPS of the RTX 2070 and 52.31 FPS of the 1080 Ti could reach 60 FPS with minor settings adjustments. Moving to 4K, we saw 32.2 FPS from the RTX 2070, and only another 1.7 FPS above that was the 1080 Ti. The mighty 2080 Ti maxed out at just 49.04 FPS. Oh boy, the Extreme profile should be fun, right?

1080p

1440p

2160p

Extreme

Now, this is where we saw something very strange indeed. At Extreme, the RTX 2080 Ti, 2080, and 2070 actually performed slightly better than they did on the Ultra profile. However, the GTX 1080 Ti dropped down to just 40 FPS, vs the 60 it did at Ultra 1080p. What caused this disparity is unknown, but a few extra retests confirmed the figures for us nicely enough.

Things got even weirder at 1440p, as the 2080 Ti scored 90.97 FPS, which is higher than it scored in both High and Ultra profiles. However, below that the 2080 Ti only hit 53, the 1080 Ti 30.79, and the RTX 2070 just 28.27; positively cinematic framerates.

At 4K, all the cards ran into a corner and cried. This game is beyond demanding even on the latest flagship GPUs. 16.97 FPS for the RTX 2070, and at most, only 26.32 for the RTX 2080 Ti. Can it Run Crysis? More like, Can it Run Metro!

1080p

1440p

2160p